Google hammers on Levandowski, who remains in charge of Uber's self-driving cars.

New legal filings in the Waymo v. Uber litigation lay out more of Google's allegations against ex-Googler Anthony Levandowski, who now heads up Uber's self-driving car unit.

According to a Google document filed in court yesterday, Levandowski created "competing side businesses" as early as 2012 while he was still working for Google. That's when Levandowski is said to have incorporated a company called Odin Wave LLC, with a physical address at a building he owned in Berkeley, California.

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Odin Wave submitted an order to a hardware maker asking for a "customer-fabricated part" similar to what Google used in its self-driving cars. Google employees investigated Odin Wave, noted the connections to Levandowski, and questioned the engineer about it, but Levandowski denied having any ownership, according to Google lawyers.

Google claims Odin Wave later merged with another LLC called Tyto Lidar, which ultimately became part of Otto—Levandowski's startup that was later acquired by Uber for $680 million.

Levandowski not only started work on his competing self-driving car business while he still worked at Google, he tried to recruit more Googlers to join him, according to the filing. He worked together with a partner who also was at Google and whose name is redacted from the filings. However, as TechCrunch notes in its review of the new documents, the work history described matches that of Otto cofounder Lior Ron.

Further Reading

The filing also notes that Levandowski received incentive payments from Google, but it redacts the amount in the public filing. Bloomberg reported that the incentive payments totaled more than $120 million.